Re: [DevHelp] Some requests

[Biswapesh Chattopadhyay <biswapesh_chatterjee tcscal co in>]

On Mon, 2003-03-31 at 18:45, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> mån 2003-03-31 klockan 13.41 skrev Biswapesh Chattopadhyay:
> > On Mon, 2003-03-31 at 16:45, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> 
> > Well, as far as I am aware, there is no clear-cut decision that a merge
> > will *never* take place, so maybe there is no hurry to immediate change
> > the name ?
> 
> I think it's important to make it clear where we stand and what we plan
> for the future. The reason for this is that if I (or anyone else) wants
> to help out on the development platform for GNOME it's today very hard
> to get into where to help.
> 
> Today I have to take a descision on whether to help on Anjuta2 or
> Anjuta1 without knowing if my work will be dropped in the future. We
> announce Anjuta2 to be the successor to Anjuta1 but no work towards this
> is done.
> 

There have been long discussions on this issue, and I agree that this is
a problem, but sadly, no party is ready to move over to the "other side"
- I guess it's a matter of approach and familiarity. As you say, no one
likes to see their effort wasted. The anjuta2 guys have spent a
significant amount of time working on their project and would not like
to see it come to nought. OTOH, I have invested a significant amount of
my limited free ensuring that anjuta has all the features I need, so I
would not like to see everything thrown away and rewritten.

So, it also follows that, depending on who you ask, you will be
encouraged to work on anjuta1 or anjuta2. I'm surprised Jeroen, Gustavo
and TTimo are silent on this issue so far ;-)

> Anjuta1 is usable as it is today, Anjuta2 is pretty far from being
> usable. Should I help on adding stuff that I lack in Anjuta1 or will
> that be dropped for Anjuta2 ...
> 
> It would be really good if we could get a decission on this, and make it
> obvious what that decission is. Otherwise I think it's better to keep
> them separated so that people know what they are contributing there time
> to.
> 

For the time being, I think that is the most reasonable assumption -
they are seperate projects and likely to remain so in the short term at
least. Ideally, the contribution should be in a way so that it is usable
by both projects. For example, the tagmanager library I wrote is used in
both anjuta1 and anjuta2 (the anjuta2 integration was done by Naba,
IIRC). Currently, I have plans to study the anjuta2 code thoroughly and
identify further areas of cooperation.

What I would really like to see in the medium term is that most
functionality is written as widgets/library form and used by both
anjuta1 and anjuta2. This is why I'm trying to get people who are
working on Glade, Devhelp, etc. to widgetify their code so that they can
be integrated nicely into either shell. I'm been moderately successful
in my efforts too - the glade3 code has been mostly widgetified - I've
promised them a patch so that the widget set is installed seperately a
library - but haven't got around to doing it yet, sadly :-(

There is no harm in having seperate GUI shells as long as there is good
code reuse of the base components. After all, writing the shell is not
as big a deal as the components themselves. For example, the anjuta1
debugger works really well for most people. It would be nice if it could
be segregated into it's own component so that anjuta2 can use it as
well. OTOH, anjuta2 uses a really cool docking widget which is very
flexible - we would like to use that to give more flexibility to our UI.

<snip>

-- 
Biswa.